Page 14 - The Power to Change Anything

The Power to

Change Anything

f you’re like most people, you face several influence chal-
lenges that have you stumped. For instance, at work you’re
Ifighting an uphill battle. You’ve given your heart and soul
to a quality-improvement program, but your best efforts to make
quality part of the everyday culture have yielded no improve-
ments whatsoever. None.
At the personal level, you’re fighting a weight problem that
has gone on for years. Actually you have a metabolism problem.
It turns out your body doesn’t burn 6,000 calories a day. Talk
about bad luck.
At the family level, your oldest son just turned 13, and he
hangs out with a pretty frightening-looking crowd that appears
to have lost all interest in civility, decency, and hair care. You’ve
tried reasoning and bribing and even a well-timed threat, but
when you talk to him, there’s no one home. It’s as if the day
he turned 13 your ability to influence him expired.
At the community level, you have a neighbor who allows
three vicious, three-foot-tall pit bulls to wander his backyard
with impunity. The problem is his four-foot fence. It’s just a
matter of time until the dogs break out and run wild, but the
local animal control people won’t do a thing about it. Accord-
ing to them, someone has to suffer before they can take action.
To cap the whole thing off, your region of the country is going
through a five-year drought because apparently the world is
heating up like a meatball in a microwave.
And you can’t fix any of this.

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